


peacock utopia

by miuyi (rainiest)



Category: TWICE (Band)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27525277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainiest/pseuds/miuyi
Summary: When Jeongyeon thinks back to that night, the thing she remembers isn’t the rooster that vanished or how the forest caught on fire.Inspired by the short film 'Kiss Burn' from Netflix'sPersona.
Relationships: Minatozaki Sana/Yoo Jeongyeon
Comments: 3
Kudos: 46
Collections: #GGFLASHFIC





	peacock utopia

**Author's Note:**

> [Kiss Burn](https://www.netflix.com/watch/81082535?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2Cefcb1f7694b9004d20a5d3918b8485841b7d28aa%3Ae5dede72bd08f9ee0963c281fd0c47b3c05b5ef5%2Cefcb1f7694b9004d20a5d3918b8485841b7d28aa%3Ae5dede72bd08f9ee0963c281fd0c47b3c05b5ef5%2Cunknown%2C) from _Persona_ (2019) starring Lee Jieun/IU
> 
> This fic can be read without watching the source material, but unless you want to be very confused I'd highly recommend watching it. Episodes are stand-alone, running time approx 20 mins. 
> 
> Please be warned that the episode features abusive behaviour in a father-daughter relationship, specifically the cutting of hair as punishment (not shown on screen). It is also mentioned in this fic, but not focused upon. If you'd like more info before choosing to watch/read, here's my [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/rainiest)
> 
> Fic also mentions dieting, smoking, and contains brief homophobic implications.

When Jeongyeon thinks back to that night, the thing she remembers isn’t the rooster that vanished or how the forest caught on fire. It isn’t even the guy she kissed at the beach later, her hands forgotten at her sides because she was so busy worrying about what he’d do with his.

What she remembers is Sana laughing so hard every time the bicycle bumped over a rocky patch in the road that Jeongyeon nearly veered off into the bushes. How it was cold that night but Sana was radiating heat like pavement in the middle of summer. They stopped halfway there and shared the can of coke in Jeongyeon’s backpack, which had been shaken up so badly on the ride that when Jeongyeon cracked it open brown fizz shot a foot into the air. That brought Sana to her knees in the dirt, laughing like she was being murdered. 

“Shut up!” Jeongyeon hissed, laughed, wiping her hands on her tracksuit pants. “Someone’s gonna call the police! Or come out here and kill us for real!”

Sana uncurled herself enough to look up at Jeongyeon, still clutching her stomach. “No, they won’t,” she said, voice weak and croaky with laughter. The smell of smoke. Something, somewhere, was burning. “You’d never let them get us.”

Sana had been quiet on the way back. When they got home she laid her head on Jeongyeon’s thigh while she smoked the last cigarette in her pack. By that time, the forest fire had been lit and put out. Jeongyeon wouldn’t hear about it until school the next morning.

“Was that the same one as last time?” Jeongyeon asked. Sana’s sweatshirt was unzipped to her sternum. She looked like she’d been attacked by leeches. Twice in two weeks. What crazy odds.

“Nope,” Sana said. She yawned into the sleeve of her sweatshirt. When she took her hand away, she was smiling. “But I liked him better.”

Jeongyeon held her arm behind her and flicked ash off the end of her cigarette. The hens clucked nervously in their enclosure. 

“You get hurt often, don’t you?” Sana’s father had asked her the first time she met him. Dirty t-shirt, dirty hands. “I can just tell.”

Jeongyeon remembers how badly she wanted to kill him back then. How she’d spent hours after nightfall soaping up the bathroom floor and sawing through the leg of his favourite chair. How she told Sana it was all a prank but really she was just trying to make it look like an accident.

When he’d told her, “People like you, you never learn,” she’d felt only contempt and the urge to cut his brake lines.

Not until much later did she stop to consider that maybe he was right.

“He had no idea about anything,” Sana would tell Jeongyeon one night after years had passed, and with them many other things. “Not about me, or you. Or anything else.”

“Bad people can be right sometimes,” Jeongyeon tried to reason. "Didn't you tell me that once?" They were on the cusp of winter. She could hear the sea but no voices.

“No,” Sana said, moonlight finding its grave across her face. She sounded sure. She looked sure. “Not him.”

Sana arrived before Nayeon left, so it’s only natural that Jeongyeon doesn’t remember much of her at all.

“I heard her dad anonymously blackmailed the prime minister,” Nayeon said, splintering the end of her popsicle stick between her molars. “The detectives almost had him so they had to flee the country and leave her mom behind.”

Jeongyeon squinted across the playground at the girl with bowl-cut bangs sitting on the edge of a planter, eating the lunch she brought from home. “That’s bullshit.”

Nayeon shrugged. “That’s what everyone’s saying.” A group of boys kicked their ball near Sana and she looked up from her lap. She watched them until they drifted away.

Jeongyeon does remember Nayeon’s last day with all the clarity of a skinned knee. Insects the size of dust motes were flocking around the climbing plants above their heads. Jeongyeon was plucking at the grass and crushing the young blades between her fingertips, brick at the slump of her back and damp soaking through her skirt. 

A second grader wiped out on the playground and Nayeon laughed so loud it edged on cruel. Jeongyeon picked and picked at the grass. She hated the mundanity of it all. She never wanted it to end.

Nayeon checked the time on her rule-violation snap bracelet watch. “The bell’s about to go,” she said, uncrossing her legs. “Let’s go so we don’t get the ugly aprons for art class.”

Down the hill a bunch of younger girls were running in figure-eights. Making meaning out of nothing. Nayeon was on her feet, her back turned. 

Jeongyeon should have reached out and snagged the hem of her skirt. Told her not to go. 

Somewhere in some parallel universe, maybe she did.

For the hickey incident, Sana was on house arrest for three weeks. Jeongyeon got in the routine of stopping by the strip of takeaway places in town and waiting in the tall grass by the bend in the road for Sana's father’s truck to pass before she cycled up to the house.

“Did you know meat chickens are male and female?” Sana said, nibbling at a drumstick, her choppy chin-length hair tucked behind her ears. She always took the time to get all the meat off the bone, no matter how hungry she was. “It’s not like cows, how they mostly use the males for beef and the females for dairy.”

“Where’d you learn that?” Jeongyeon asked. The microwave in the house was broken so the chicken was cold, fat solidified at the bottom of the box.

Sana shrugged. She set a clean bone aside and picked up another drumstick. “Don’t remember.” 

Jeongyeon had this theory that her life would be much better as a peacock.

The week after Gongyeon graduated high school she packed a pink acrylic suitcase and moved up to Seoul on her supermarket job savings. After that, there was just a rushed phone call twice a month and an empty bedroom.

“You could always come up to Seoul,” Gongyeon told her one time. “You’d be pretty enough if you tried. Maybe not for high fashion, but your look would work for commercial stuff.”

Jeongyeon didn’t know how to explain to her that she’d rather just be ugly if trying would get her the life her sister had; sharing a three bedroom apartment with ten other girls, counting calories and spare change.

"Haven't you ever wondered what it'd be like to be a peacock?" she said instead.

“That’s a weird thing to wonder,” her sister replied, voice crackling with interference. “But you’ve always been a little weird.”

“I think it makes perfect sense,” Jeongyeon said shortly, irrationally annoyed, twisting her finger through the spirals in the phone cord.

“I suppose,” Gongyeon hummed, serene. Sounds carried over long distances, like written letters, often missed the point. “I kind of get it. Peacocks are beautiful.”

The phone was in the hallway and there was nowhere to sit but the floor. The light was off and the abstract shapes of her mother moving around in the kitchen were superimposed on the wallpaper opposite, shadows on yellow light.

“Not all of them,” said Jeongyeon. 

Jeongyeon and Sana studied that microwave’s instruction manual for a whole evening, messing around with the settings and a screwdriver until the plate of _bossam_ came out steaming. Sana jumped up and down and hugged her, all of her sharp angles buffeting Jeongyeon off balance.

That winter the radiator leaked and they dug through the outside shed for the epoxy resin, freezing in their socks and slip-on shoes. In July the lights in the back half of the house went out and Jeongyeon crawled into the roof space and fixed the wiring. 

Years later, they bought an ancient little house on the other side of the island. The insulation was falling out of parts of the ceiling and there were three broken windows on the sea-facing side from last season’s vicious storm.

“Jihyo said she overheard the aunties gossiping about us in the fresh produce section,” Jeongyeon told Sana at the end of a day, a steady ache in her shoulders as she cut vegetables. “About if we’re living together or, y'know. _Living together_.”

Sana looked up from the kitchen table, where she’d been camped over paperwork since they got home. She kept her hair long these days, down to her ribs, and it was so black it shone like silk in the overhead light. 

“Does that bother you?” Sana asked, looking amused. “It’s good for business.”

Sana had been the subject of gossip in town since she was eleven years old and fresh off the plane, banned from speaking Japanese by her father but unable to understand a word of Korean. Jeongyeon tried not to think about it too often. The awe was uncontainable, and the anger was unbearable.

“I just don’t think the housewives are going to want lesbians in their house fixing their fridge,” Jeongyeon said, pushing down hard with her palm on the back of the knife to cut through a sweet potato.

“ _Alleged_ lesbians,” Sana corrected. “Besides,” she pushed aside the paperwork and stood, “if they don’t call us, they’ve gotta let some strange man into their house.”

Sana rounded the counter and pressed the edge of her thumb right into the knot in Jeongyeon’s shoulder, pinpoint accurate. Her hair smelled of the paint stripper they’d used today and her thumb was rough and calloused. 

She rested her weight into Jeongyeon’s back and tiptoed to whisper in her ear. “My money’s on the lesbians.”

Jeongyeon had sort of liked kissing boys on the beach, until one day she hated it. She sat under the pier with her arms crossed and her bike propped up behind her, a deliberate radius between her and the boys as Sana walked to the other end of the beach where the shadows were deepest, hand in hand with some guy who smelled like smoke and looked at her like a starving dog.

 _I think you’re wonderful_ , Jeongyeon had wanted to tell her before she left, though she couldn't explain why.

One day Jeongyeon rode up to the house and all the lights were out. Sana’s father’s truck was gone, and no one answered when she knocked. So she sat down in the scrap car seats by the hen enclosure and waited.

An hour passed, then two. She watched the chickens go about their mindless little lives.

“I could kill you, you know,” Jeongyeon told them. They poked around on the hay, ignoring her. “I’m bigger and I’m stronger. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

One hen paused to regard her with a beady black eye, for long enough that she began to squirm. It clucked softly and turned back to the dirt.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Was it crazier to threaten chickens or to apologise to them? “I would never actually do it.”

She fished the packet from her backpack and lit a cigarette. The chickens kept ignoring her. Either they'd forgotten about that autumn night last year or they just didn’t care. She exhaled smoke and told them, “I just think it’s fucked up, is all.”

But the chickens weren’t listening to her, and Sana didn’t come home.

 _People like you_ , said a ghost from the doorway of the house. Dirty t-shirt, dirty hands. _You never learn._

When her father’s sentencing was over and he was deported, the first thing Sana did was go online and order a crate of Japanese language novels. When they moved, Jeongyeon measured up the living room wall and built the shelves herself.

Sana was reading with her legs up on the couch, the cat asleep across her ankles, when Jeongyeon asked, “Don't you have any regrets?”

Sana rested the open book against her stomach so she wouldn’t lose her page and thought for a moment. “Bad decisions, sure,” she said, head tilted. “None that I regret.”

Jeongyeon frowned from her seat at the dining room table. “I don’t think I get it.”

Sana tipped her head back over the arm of the couch and gathered her hair in her hands. The yellow light shining through black strands gave Jeongyeon déjà vu. 

“How can I put this,” she mused, letting her hair waterfall from her grip with gravity. “You know how sometimes a thing happens, and it's so terrible it changes a life forever. I think to make up for it, maybe only once or twice in a lifetime, fate gives you a chance.”

“A chance?” Jeongyeon asked. _Wonderful_ , she still wanted to tell her, all the damn time. _You’re so wonderful._

“A chance to do just the right thing at just the right time,” Sana said, twisting to meet Jeongyeon’s gaze. Eyes full of words in a language Jeongyeon couldn’t read. “And if you get it right..." A sly smile crossed her face, like she held all the world's secrets. "Well, you'll see."

That day, like always, they rode Jeongyeon’s bike down the rocky path to the beach. Night had fallen already, thick and dark. From the top of the ridge Jeongyeon could see the lights under the pier, phone screens and lit cigarettes. Behind her, Sana hopped off the bike seat. She began to head down the path to the beach, her back turned. 

Jeongyeon had been here before. She felt the world slow and hold its breath.

She reached out and caught the back of Sana’s sweatshirt.

“Wait,” she said. Heart beating far too fast.

Sana stopped, turned in place. “Yes?” she asked. 

Up here there were no shadows and no strange men. Only moonlight, and that indescribable warmth in Sana’s eyes that Jeongyeon was beginning to realise she called home.

"Don't go," Jeongyeon told her.

The air shivered and the earth swayed, like gravity had heard a plea and answered.

"A new universe opens up," whispered a familiar voice from somewhere unknown. 

“I’d been waiting, you know,” Sana told her. Years and years later, in a tiny old house by the sea with bookcases up to the ceiling and an old tortoiseshell cat. “I was starting to think I'd be waiting forever.”

Jeongyeon reached out across the sheets and Sana’s hand was there. Her eyes were dark and dense, like the center of a universe.

“I guess I learned," said Jeongyeon. 

**Author's Note:**

> [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/rainiest)/[twitter](https://twitter.com/rlybadweather)


End file.
